Nada Abdallah Scripts are not only written or read—they are felt. Homeland in Letterforms explores how Arabic typography can embody the textures of cultural memory and the material weight of belonging. Centered on Qairawani Kufic—a script known for its geometric rigor and structural density—the project reinterprets Arabic letterforms as vessels of lived experience and collective remembrance.
The work proposes a framework termed Mnemonic Typography—a design theory that repositions the act of making letters as a cycle of remembering, moving between memory, hand, grid, code, and mind.
Through manual calligraphy, digital reconstruction, and AI-generated variation, the project examines how memory migrates between human and machinic gestures. Echoing the associative logic of the childhood game Insān, Ḥayawān, Nabāt, Jamād, Bilād (person, animal, plant, object, and country)—where a single letter evokes a constellation of recollections—Homeland in Letterforms treats typography itself as an active mnemonic system.
By pairing typographic form with documentary photography, the project constructs a tactile archive in which image and script co-create meaning.
Reactivating ancient letterforms as a contemporary visual language, it asks how typography can preserve the intimacy of memory while imagining new futures of belonging.